Top Online Dating Services

Review Top Online Matchmaking Dating Services

Jupiter Media estimates that about 40 million singles are using online dating
services in 2004. There are thousands of dating services hosting in the
Internet. Most sites charge monthly fees in order for members to contact other
members. These monthly fees usually range from $10 to 50 dollars. The average
yearly cost to join a dating services is about $300. If 5% of dating singles are
the paid members, then the dating service market will reach 1 billion dollars
membership fee in
2005. Besides membership fee income, all big dating services still have huge amount of revenue from
advertisement and local dating party events. That's why many people still want
to get into dating service market.

Inadequate membership size is the biggest issue for online
dating services. Many dating sites keep ambiguous reporting of the size of
the membership database. When a company reports that they have millions of
members, actually only a small percentage of members are active or subscribing
members. Since the dating services accept the members worldwide and half of the
members are of the opposite sex, so the chance of you to find your right match
close to your city is very small, unless the database is extremely huge.

The good search function of dating services should help people to find and
reach the right match. The basic search function is to filter matches by member's
profile, state, city, zip and distance. Also, they provides a quick search
function, which means they want to find someone for you, in case that you cannot
find any match for the standard search function. In order to make sure you can
reach someone, the advanced search function can look for current online members,
new members, most active members, most popular members, most networked member, most inviting member, keywords in the
profiles and even members of today's birthday.

The key is to contact the match. Some dating services allow people to
create multiple profiles to increase the matching possibility. Therefore, to find the company owns a very large membership database is a
better bargain to join. According to traffic report in June 2002, Match.com had
more visitors than all other competitors.

You might want to know who is the largest dating services today. Since most
of dating services are exaggerating their member's size. However, the Internet
traffic won't lie. Most of Internet traffic data have the commercial value, which needs to pay
to get it. The alternative way to find the online dating site's traffic is from
the alexa.com to find the the traffic ranking. If the ranking is higher, then the
database must be larger.

Match.com
launched in 1995, has
8 million
members in 2004.
More than 89,000
members reported they found the match in 2003.
It operates
more than 30 online dating sites (28
international dating sites),
in 18 local languages. Member's profiles
are viewed more than 6 million times a day.
It's the
world's leading
online dating site, according to the global ranking by Media Metrix in March
2004. Kiss.com and Udate.com are its sister sites.

Alexa ranking is for entire Yahoo site.
Therefore it's ranked number 1. Yahoo! Personals has well over 9 million members with profiles.
It has more than 10 sites, including the international sites. There was
over 7.2 Million Unique Canadian visits to
Yahoo! Personals in 2003.

Tickle.com was Emode.com, which founded in 1999.
Tickle launched the Tickle Social Network in October 2003. Tickle was
acquired by Monster Worldwide in May 2004. The matchmaking, and social networking services have more than 18 million active
members worldwide.

Lavalife markets its web and telephone products
in over 60 markets across the United States, Canada and Australia. It has
attracted over 6 million unique members. Its members exchange 1.3 million
messages every day. Lavalife's revenues are in excess of $100 million in
2003 and growing.

Gay.com has over 3.3 million profiles including PlanetOut.com in 2004 and is growing by thousands a day. They are
100% gay and lesbian dating service that has a worldwide reach and is in 7
different languages.

eharmony.com has 4 million members in 2004 and 3,000 confirmed weddings since Year
2000. Members are over 228 Countries.
Membership, which runs nearly $100 for three months or almost $250 for a
year. eharmony.com's ad campaign cost the
company more than $10 million in 2003.The company has had about 33 million
members as of 2008. about 15,000 people take the eHarmony questionnaire each day. An average of 542 eHarmony members
in the U.S. marry every day in 2010.